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THE INNOCENTS ABROAD
ing green. After nightfall we reached our tents, just outside of
the nasty Arab village of Jonesborough. Of course the real
name of the place is El something or other, but the boys still
refuse to recognize the Arab names or try to pronounce them.
When I say that that village is of the usual style, I mean to insinuate that all Syrian villages within fi fty miles of Damascus
are alike – so much alike that it would require more than human intelligence to tell wherein one differed from another.
A Syrian village is a hive of huts one story high (the height of
a man,) and as square as a dry-goods box; it is mud-plastered
all over, fl at roof and all, and generally whitewashed after
a fashion. The same roof often extends over half the town,
covering many of the streets, which are generally about a yard
wide. When you ride through one of these villages at noonday, you fi rst meet a melancholy dog, that looks up at you and
silently begs that you won’t run over him, but he does not offer to get out of the way; next you meet a young boy without
any clothes on, and he holds out his hand and says “Bucksheesh!” – he don’t really expect a cent, but then he learned to
say that before he learned to say mother, and now he can not
break himself of it; next you meet a woman with a black veil
drawn closely over her face, and her bust exposed; fi nally, you
come to several sore-eyed children and children in all stages of
mutilation and decay; and sitting humbly in the dust, and all
fringed with fi lthy rags, is a poor devil whose arms and legs are
gnarled and twisted like grape-vines. These are all the people
you are likely to see. The balance of the population are asleep
within doors, or abroad tending goats in the plains and on
the hill-sides. The village is built on some consumptive little
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MARK TWAIN
water-course, and about it is a little fresh-looking vegetation.
Beyond this charmed circle, for miles on every side, stretches a weary desert of sand and gravel, which produces a gray
bunchy shrub like sage-brush. A Syrian village is the sorriest sight in the world, and its surroundings are eminently in
keeping with it.
I would not have gone into this dissertation upon Syrian
villages but for the fact that Nimrod, the Mighty Hunter of
Scriptural notoriety, is buried in Jonesborough, and I wished
the public to know about how he is located. Like Homer, he is
said to be buried in many other places, but this is the only true
and genuine place his ashes inhabit.
When the original tribes were dispersed, more than four
thousand years ago, Nimrod and a large party traveled three
or four hundred miles, and settled where the great city of
Babylon afterwards stood. Nimrod built that city. He also began to build the famous Tower of Babel, but circumstances
over which he had no control put it out of his power to fi nish it. He ran it up eight stories high, however, and two of
them still stand, at this day – a colossal mass of brickwork,
rent down the centre by earthquakes, and seared and vitrifi ed by the lightnings of an angry God. But the vast ruin will
still stand for ages, to shame the puny labors of these modern
generations of men. Its huge compartments are tenanted by
owls and lions, and old Nimrod lies neglected in this wretched
village, far from the scene of his grand enterprise.
We left Jonesborough very early in the morning, and rode
forever and forever and forever, it seemed to me, over parched
deserts and rocky hills, hungry, and with no water to drink.
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THE INNOCENTS ABROAD
We had drained the goat-skins dry in a little while. At noon
we halted before the wretched Arab town of El Yuba Dam,
perched on the side of a mountain, but the dragoman said if
we applied there for water we would be attacked by the whole
tribe, for they did not love Christians. We had to journey on.
Two hours later we reached the foot of a tall isolated mountain,
which is crowned by the crumbling castle of Banias, the stateliest ruin of that kind on earth, no doubt. It is a thousand
feet long and two hundred wide, all of the most symmetrical,
and at the same time the most ponderous masonry. The massive towers and bastions are more than thirty feet high, and
have been sixty. From the mountain’s peak its broken turrets
rise above the groves of ancient oaks and olives, and look wonderfully picturesque. It is of such high antiquity that no man
knows who built it or when it was built. It is utterly inaccessible, except in one place, where a bridle-path winds upward
among the solid rocks to the old portcullis. The horses’ hoofs
have bored holes in these rocks to the depth of six inches during the hundreds and hundreds of years that the castle was
garrisoned. We wandered for three hours among the chambers and crypts and dungeons of the fortress, and trod where
the mailed heels of many a knightly Crusader had rang, and
where Phenician heroes had walked ages before them.
We wondered how such a solid mass of masonry could be
affected even by an earthquake, and could not understand
what agency had made Banias a ruin; but we found the destroyer, after a while, and then our wonder was increased tenfold. Seeds had fallen in crevices in the vast walls; the seeds
had sprouted; the tender, insignifi cant sprouts had hardened;
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MARK TWAIN
they grew larger and larger, and by a steady, imperceptible
pressure forced the great stones apart, and now are bringing sure destruction upon a giant work that has even mocked
the earthquakes to scorn! Gnarled and twisted trees spring
from the old walls every where, and beautify and overshadow
the gray battlements with a wild luxuriance of foliage.
From these old towers we looked down upon a broad, farreaching green plain, glittering with the pools and rivulets
which are the sources of the sacred river Jordan. It was a grateful vision, after so much desert.
And as the evening drew near, we clambered down
the mountain, through groves of the Biblical oaks of Bashan,
(for we were just stepping over the border and entering
the long-sought Holy Land,) and at its extreme foot, toward
the wide valley, we entered this little execrable village of
Banias and camped in a great grove of olive trees near a torrent of sparkling water whose banks are arrayed in fi g-trees,
pomegranates and oleanders in full leaf. Barring the proximity of the village, it is a sort of paradise.
The very fi rst thing one feels like doing when he gets into
camp, all burning up and dusty, is to hunt up a bath. We followed the stream up to where it gushes out of the mountain
side, three hundred yards from the tents, and took a bath that
was so icy that if I did not know this was the main source of
the sacred river, I would expect harm to come of it. It was bathing at noonday in the chilly source of the Abana, “River of Damascus,” that gave me the cholera, so Dr. B. said. However, it
generally does give me the cholera to take a bath.
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THE INNOCENTS ABROAD
The incorrigible pilgrims have come in with their pockets
full of specimens broken from the ruins. I wish this vandalism could be stopped. They broke off fragments from Noah’s
tomb; from the exquisite sculptures of the temples of Baalbec;
from the houses of Judas and Ananias, in Damascus; from
the tomb of Nimrod the Mighty Hunter in Jonesborough;
from the worn Greek and Roman inscriptions set in the hoary
walls of the Castle of Banias; and now they have been hacking
and chipping these old arches here that Jesus looked upon in
the fl esh. Heaven protect the Sepulchre when this tribe invades Jerusalem!
The ruins here are not very interesting. There are the massive walls of a great square building that was once the citadel;
there are many ponderous old arches that are so smothered
with debris that they barely project above the ground; there
are heavy-walled sewers through which the crystal brook of
which Jordan is born still runs; in the hill-side are the substructions of a costly marble temple that Herod the Great built
here – patches of its handsome mosaic fl oors still remain; there
is a quaint old stone bridge that was here before Herod’s time,
may be; scattered every where, in the paths and in the woods,
are Corinthian capitals, broken porphyry pillars, and little
fragments of sculpture; and up yonder in the precipice where
the fountain gushes out, are well-worn Greek inscriptions
over niches in the rock where in ancient times the Greeks,
and after them the Romans, worshipped the sylvan god Pan.
But trees and bushes grow above many of these ruins now;
the miserable huts of a little crew of fi lthy Arabs are perched
upon the broken masonry of antiquity, the whole place has
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MARK TWAIN
a sleepy, stupid, rural look about it, and one can hardly bring
himself to believe that a busy, substantially built city once existed here, even two thousand years ago. The place was nevertheless the scene of an event whose effects have added page after page and volume after volume to the world’s history. For in
this place Christ stood when he said to Peter:
“Thou art Peter; and upon this rock will I build my church,
and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give
unto thee the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven; and whatsoever
thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
On those little sentences have been built up the mighty
edifi ce of the Church of Rome; in them lie the authority for
the imperial power of the Popes over temporal affairs, and
their godlike power to curse a soul or wash it white from
sin. To sustain the position of “the only true Church,” which
Rome claims was thus conferred upon her, she has fought
and labored and struggled for many a century, and will continue to keep herself busy in the same work to the end of time.
The memorable words I have quoted give to this ruined city
about all the interest it possesses to people of the present day.
It seems curious enough to us to be standing on ground that
was once actually pressed by the feet of the Saviour. The situation is suggestive of a reality and a tangibility that seem at
variance with the vagueness and mystery and ghostliness that
one naturally attaches to the character of a god. I can not comprehend yet that I am sitting where a god has stood, and looking upon the brook and the mountains which that god looked
upon, and am surrounded by dusky men and women whose
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THE INNOCENTS ABROAD
ancestors saw him, and even talked with him, face to face, and
carelessly, just as they would have done with any other stranger. I can not comprehend this; the gods of my understanding
have been always hidden in clouds and very far away.
This morning, during breakfast, the usual assemblage of
squalid humanity sat patiently without the charmed circle of
the camp and waited for such crumbs as pity might bestow
upon their misery. There were old and young, brown-skinned
and yellow. Some of the men were tall and stalwart, (for one
hardly sees any where such splendid-looking men as here in
the East,) but all the women and children looked worn and
sad, and distressed with hunger. They reminded me much of
Indians, did these people. They had but little clothing, but
such as they had was fanciful in character and fantastic in its
arrangement. Any little absurd gewgaw or gimcrack they had
they disposed in such a way as to make it attract attention most
readily. They sat in silence, and with tireless patience watched
our every motion with that vile, uncomplaining impoliteness
which is so truly Indian, and which makes a white man so nervous and uncomfortable and savage that he wants to exterminate the whole tribe.
These people about us had other peculiarities, which I have
noticed in the noble red man, too: they were infested with vermin, and the dirt had caked on them till it amounted to bark.
The little children were in a pitiable condition – they all
had sore eyes, and were otherwise affl icted in various ways.
They say that hardly a native child in all the East is free from
sore eyes, and that thousands of them go blind of one eye or
both every year. I think this must be so, for I see plenty of blind
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MARK TWAIN
people every day, and I do not remember seeing any children
that hadn’t sore eyes. And, would you suppose that an American mother could sit for an hour, with her child in her arms,
and let a hundred fl ies roost upon its eyes all that time undisturbed? I see that every day. It makes my fl esh creep. Yesterday we met a woman riding on a little jackass, and she had
a little child in her arms – honestly, I thought the child had
goggles on as we approached, and I wondered how its mother
could afford so much style. But when we drew near, we saw that
the goggles were nothing but a camp meeting of fl ies assembled around each of the child’s eyes, and at the same time there
was a detachment prospecting its nose. The fl ies were happy,
the child was contented, and so the mother did not interfere.
As soon as the tribe found out that we had a doctor in
our party, they began to fl ock in from all quarters. Dr. B., in
the charity of his nature, had taken a child from a woman
who sat near by, and put some sort of a wash upon its diseased
eyes. That woman went off and started the whole nation, and
it was a sight to see them swarm! The lame, the halt, the blind,
the leprous – all the distempers that are bred of indolence,
dirt, and iniquity – were represented in the Congress in ten
minutes, and still they came! Every woman that had a sick baby
brought it along, and every woman that hadn’t, borrowed one.
What reverent and what worshiping looks they bent upon
that dread, mysterious power, the Doctor! They watched him
take his phials out; they watched him measure the particles of
white powder; they watched him add drops of one precious
liquid, and drops of another; they lost not the slightest movement; their eyes were riveted upon him with a fascination that
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THE INNOCENTS ABROAD
nothing could distract. I believe they thought he was gifted
like a god. When each individual got his portion of medicine,
his eyes were radiant with joy – notwithstanding by nature
they are a thankless and impassive race – and upon his face
was written the unquestioning faith that nothing on earth
could prevent the patient from getting well now.
Christ knew how to preach to these simple, superstitious,
disease-tortured creatures: He healed the sick. They fl ocked to
our poor human doctor this morning when the fame of what
he had done to the sick child went abroad in the land, and
they worshiped him with their eyes while they did not know
as yet whether there was virtue in his simples or not. The ancestors of these – people precisely like them in color, dress,
manners, customs, simplicity – fl ocked in vast multitudes after Christ, and when they saw Him make the affl icted whole
with a word, it is no wonder they worshiped Him. No wonder
His deeds were the talk of the nation. No wonder the multitude that followed Him was so great that at one time – thirty
miles from here – they had to let a sick man down through
the roof because no approach could be made to the door; no
wonder His audiences were so great at Galilee that He had to
preach from a ship removed a little distance from the shore;
no wonder that even in the desert places about Bethsaida, fi ve
thousand invaded His solitude, and He had to feed them by
a miracle or else see them suffer for their confi ding faith and
devotion; no wonder when there was a great commotion in
a city in those days, one neighbor explained it to another in
words to this effect: “They say that Jesus of Nazareth is come!”
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MARK TWAIN
Well, as I was saying, the doctor distributed medicine as
long as he had any to distribute, and his reputation is mighty in
Galilee this day. Among his patients was the child of the Shiek’s
daughter – for even this poor, ragged handful of sores and
sin has its royal Shiek – a poor old mummy that looked as if
he would be more at home in a poor-house than in the Chief
Magistracy of this tribe of hopeless, shirtless savages. The princess – I mean the Shiek’s daughter – was only thirteen or
fourteen years old, and had a very sweet face and a pretty one.
She was the only Syrian female we have seen yet who was not
so sinfully ugly that she couldn’t smile after ten o’clock Saturday night without breaking the Sabbath. Her child was a hard
specimen, though – there wasn’t enough of it to make a pie,
and the poor little thing looked so pleadingly up at all who
came near it (as if it had an idea that now was its chance or
never,) that we were fi lled with compassion which was genuine and not put on.
But this last new horse I have got is trying to break his
neck over the tent-ropes, and I shall have to go out and anchor him. Jericho and I have parted company. The new horse
is not much to boast of, I think. One of his hind legs bends
the wrong way, and the other one is as straight and stiff as
a tent-pole. Most of his teeth are gone, and he is as blind as bat.
His nose has been broken at some time or other, and is arched
like a culvert now. His under lip hangs down like a camel’s,
and his ears are chopped off close to his head. I had some trouble at fi rst to fi nd a name for him, but I fi nally concluded to
call him Baalbec, because he is such a magnifi cent ruin. I can
not keep from talking about my horses, because I have a very
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